Jeffrey MacDonald is back, with Errol Morris on his side

By Maria Puente, USA TODAY

Capt. Jeffrey MacDonald is shown in 1970 on his way to a court hearing.

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The ex-Green Beret doctor convicted of killing his pregnant wife and two little daughters at Fort Bragg in 1970 is locked away in federal prison, and under usual circumstances would never be heard from again. But he has been loudly proclaiming his innocence for decades, despite multiple losing appeals.

Now he's back again — only this time he has Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris on his side. Having already saved one man from an unjust conviction (The Thin Blue Line), Morris has credibility that demands attention.

So once again, America will be arguing about MacDonald — forced to confront a horrifying crime, another court hearing for an unrepentant defendant, a journalism-ethics mess, the release of a new book on the case, and new editions of an old one.

Now add a crusading filmmaker who stands athwart the federal criminal justice system and yells, "Corrupt and incompetent!"

"We may never be able to prove with absolute certainty that Jeffrey MacDonald is innocent," Morris writes in the epilogue to his new book, A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald (out Sept. 4 from Penguin Press). "But there are things we do know," such as the trial was rigged, the cops were corrupt, the evidence lost or ignored, he claims. "We know that Jeffrey MacDonald was railroaded."

Nubar Alexanian

Errol Morris has written A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald about the convicted killer.

If the trial were a farce and the police messed up, that doesn't necessarily mean the defendant isn't guilty — it means that under the rules he might have a chance for a new trial or even get off.

MacDonald, 68, hopes to get another chance. On Sept. 17, he goes back to federal court in North Carolina to argue for new evaluation of old evidence from the case, including DNA testing not available in the 1970s. He has a new ally: the North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence, one of a network of attorney groups that have helped hundreds of defendants who argued they were unjustly convicted.

Christine Mumma , executive director of the North Carolina center, says the Morris book will not affect the legal proceedings because the judge won't have read it.

"(The book) raises great points about how he did not get a fair trial and about the questions in the case, but the evidence in the book is not the new evidence as far as the courts go," she says. "If all the evidence currently available had been presented (to the original jury) he would have been acquitted."

Meanwhile, Morris' book will be competing for shelf and media space with an old book, Fatal Vision, which concluded MacDonald was guilty. On Wednesday, Signet will release the first e-book edition, followed next week by a reissue of the paperback edition.

A true-crime take on the case by journalist Joe McGinniss, Vision was published in 1983 (with more than 2.5 million copies sold in the USA), then became the locus of years of litigation from MacDonald, plus endless journalistic jousting over McGinniss' tactics in reporting it. (Also, it was made into a TV movie.) McGinness, who more recently got into a nasty spat with Sarah Palin when he moved in next door to her in Alaska to write a book about her, says he has not changed his mind about the case.

"In all the years since (1979), every court that has considered the case — including the U.S. Supreme Court— has upheld (the guilty) verdict in every respect. MacDonald is guilty not simply beyond a reasonable doubt, but beyond any doubt. No amount of speculation, conjecture and innuendo can change that," McGinniss said in a statement released by his publisher.

MacDonald was convicted in 1979 of brutally stabbing and beating wife Colette, 26, and daughters, Kimberley, 5½, and Kristen, 2½. He blamed drug-crazed "hippies" — three men and a woman in a big floppy hat — who chanted "Acid is groovy, kill the pigs." The crime looked like a copy of the then-recent Manson killings.

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